Comparative study of different methods to measure antioxidant activity of resveratrol in the presence of cyclodextrins

The antioxidant activity of resveratrol in the absence and presence of increasing concentrations of HP-β-CDs was determined using three different methods: ORAC, ABTS and DPPH. The three methods were validated and compared for their linearity, precision and accuracy in measuring resveratrol antioxidant activity. The results indicated that the most sensitive method is the ORAC assay, which can measure the lowest resveratrol concentration (0.15–2 μM) with the highest precision. In the presence of increasing concentrations of HP-β-CDs, the antioxidant activity of resveratrol was seen to increase when it was measured by the ORAC and ABTS assays. However, no increase was observed when the DPPH assay was used. With the ORAC assay, the antioxidant activity increased until all the resveratrol had been included in HP-β-CDs (0.4 mM CDs), whereas in the case of ABTS assay the plateau in antioxidant activity was reached after 2 mM HP-β-CDs, suggesting that the CDs interferences in the measurement method. When the DPPH assay was used, no effect was observed when increasing concentrations of HP-β-CDs, indicating that in a methanolic medium resveratrol is free. Therefore, so this method cannot be used to measure the effect of resveratrol complexation with CDs on its antioxidant activity.